When the Astors Owned New York Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age

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Description: In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin KaplanPulitzer Prizewinning biographer of Mark Twainvividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age. Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and WilliamMore...

In this marvelous anecdotal history, Justin KaplanPulitzer Prizewinning biographer of Mark Twainvividly brings to life a glittering, bygone age. Endowed with the largest private fortunes of their day, cousins John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor vied for primacy in New York society, producing the grandest hotels ever seen in a marriage of ostentation and efficiency that transformed American social behavior. Kaplan exposes it all in exquisite detail, taking readers from the 1890s to the Roaring Twenties in a combination of biography, history, architectural appreciation, and pure reading pleasure.

Justin Kaplan was born in Manhattan, New York on September 5, 1925. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Harvard University, followed by graduate work in the field there, but he left before earning a doctorate to work as a freelance writer and book editor. His first book, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1967 and a National Book Award. His other works include Lincoln Steffens: A Biography, When the Astors Owned New York: Blue Bloods and Grand Hotels in a Gilded Age, and Walt Whitman: A Life, which won a National Book Award. He also wrote books with his wife Anne Bernays including The Language of Names and Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York. He was the editor of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. He died from complications of Parkinson's disease on March 2, 2014 at the age of 88.

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